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Dimensions: 122 by 152.5cm.; 48 by 60in.

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Provenance: Acquired by the present owner's family from the 1958 Pittsburgh International Exhibition

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Exhibited:

Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, The 1958 Pittsburgh Bicentennial International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, 5 December 1958 - 8 February 1959, cat. no.395.

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE CANADIAN COLLECTION
The present work is registered with the William Scott Archive as no.1516.
Sarah Whitfield is currently preparing the Catalogue Raisonne of works in oil by William Scott. The William Scott Foundation would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue or in future projected catalogues. Please write to Sarah Whitfield c/o Sotheby's, 20th Century British Art Department, 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA.

'...economy developed into a grand manner.' (N.Lynton, William Scott, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p.302) The present painting belongs to a group of works which mark a significant period in Scott's career, both in terms of his work as a painter and in the way in which that work was received on an international stage. Scott's still-life painting of the late 1940s and the move into abstraction in the early years of the 1950s are well-documented, and whilst both phases inform the later painting, the work that Scott produced from the mid-1950s onwards takes on a new character that is much harder to categorise. Ostensibly continuing to use the still life format as their basis, the paintings develop in terms of composition and actual painterly quality to become something beyond the pure 'pots and pans' images that had gained him such a strong following earlier in the decade. Given a significant showing by the British Council at the 1958 Venice Biennale, the critics recognised this development, including Herbert Read, whose introduction to the exhibition catalogue tried to describe the way in which Scott's forms were both resonant of their original sources whilst becoming something quite unique and with a life of their own. This concept of a painted or sculpted form having a vitality beyond its actual physical confines was not uncommon in critical writing of the period, and indeed the text by Patrick Heron that was originally intended to introduce Scott's showing in Venice follows a similar course. However one chooses to describe it, even a brief look at the rapid development of Scott's paintings in the 1955-58 period demonstrates that something quite remarkable is happening. Brown Still Life Honeycomb Still Life Brown Still Life Upright Abstract